THERE is a glimmer of hope for the millions of people who lose their hearing every year because of damage to the sound-detecting hair cells in the inner ear. Gene therapy has been used to generate new hair cells in guinea pigs.
“That is quite a big breakthrough,” says hearing expert Alec Salt of Washington University in St Louis. He thinks the procedure should be easy to repeat in humans, with minor modifications, since the inner ears of guinea pig are very similar to those of humans.
But although neurons grew towards the new hair cells, it is not yet…
